Career Track

How long at current company: Since January 2004

Most important career influencer: My previous boss, Andrew Holland, for his discipline; my teacher Prof. Tulpule for his quest for perfection, and my mother for her determination.

Decisions I wish I could do over: Not many. That said, failures and struggles have certainly taught me a lot.

Vision

The next big thing for my industry will be: Applying technology to transform rural India. Once we do this, India will be unstoppable. Industrialization, education, agriculture, civil services accompanied by the public and private sector push in this direction, would not only change India but also open up massive opportunities.

Advice for future CIOs: Come closer to the business. Think the way the business thinks and apply technology to give solutions. The CIOs role is unique wherein one has to find opportunities in the most adverse situations and deliver value back to the business.
I also firmly believe that the CIO needs to be close to numbers. This will help a future CIO to think like an entrepreneur while giving any proposal.

On the Job

Top three initiatives:

• Consolidation and Unification: Successfully unified a heterogeneous IT infrastructure across multiple companies to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and make the IT set-up more manageable. Today, we support nearly 500 locations in 45 countries which would not have been possible without this consolidation.
  
• Security and Self-governance: Implementation of self-governance framework with tight integration of e-learning, self-testing and auditing tools for technical, physical and operational
  controls.
  
• Software as a service: In challenging market conditions, optimal process re-engineering with right automation is a must. For some businesses which are governed by a very low margin but high volume, heavy investment in automation is not sustainable. At Kuoni Travels, a focused initiative is underway, wherein we are implementing cutting-edge solutions via a pay-per-use model. This will ensure that the cost of automation is calculated per transaction. This protects us from the highs and lows of the business.

How I measure IT effectiveness:

• Optimization of IT costs, excellent service delivery and business returns from IT are three measurement parameters that we use for measuring IT effectiveness.
  
• We measure IT cost per workstation & IT cost per Full Time Equivalent (FTE) and use this as a parameter for optimization of IT costs.
  
• Service delivery is measured by employee IT satisfaction surveys on five or six key parameters.
  
• Business returns are measured by the ratio of IT costs as a percentage of Gross Operating Profits (GOP). By making incremental investments in IT, we measure how much more GOP we are able to generate.
  
• I believe that we should use IT to save money, and invest that saved money in IT to make more money.

CIO Unplugged

Leisure activities: Traveling and listening to music

Best book read recently: The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

Unknown talents: Sketching, dramatics and quizzing

If I weren't a CIO… I would have been an HR head or applied psychologist. I feel managing machines is much more easy than managing and understanding people. This is because people do not come with standard configuration